This talk will examine the software development processes used to
develop GCMs, drawing especially on a detailed study of the practices
used at the UK Met Office. We compare the practices used to develop
climate models to the development processes used for other types of
software, including commercial and open source software. In a number
of important aspects, the processes at the Met Office produce better
quality software than many industry best practices. In particular,
the current configuration management, testing and model validation
processes result in very high code quality in the operational models.
However, several significant challenges remain. These include
coordinating code changes being made by a large, multi-disciplinary
scientific community, and adapting the existing processes to work
with (multi-site) consortium and community modeling efforts. The
process of defining model configurations and verifying their
correctness is also a key weakness, and in the longer term, this
limits the usability of datasets produced by the models. The talk
will explore these challenges, and identify tools and techniques that
may help.
Steve Easterbrook is a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. (1991) in Computing from Imperial College in London (UK), and was a lecturer at the School of Cognitive and Computing Science, University of Sussex from 1990 to 1995. In 1995 he moved to the US to lead the research team at NASA´s Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Facility in West Virginia, where he investigated software verification on the Space Shuttle Flight Software, the International Space Station, the Earth Observation System, and several planetary probes. He moved to the University of Toronto in 1999. His research interests range from modelling and analysis of complex software software systems to the socio-cognitive aspects of team interaction, including communication, coordination, and shared understanding in large software teams. He has served on the program committees for many conferences and workshops in Requirements Engineering and Software Engineering, and was general chair for RE'01 and program chair for ASE'06. In the summer of 2008, he was a visiting scientist at the UK Met Office Hadley Centre.
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